Imagine a company has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of products – each with its own data: dimensions, colours, materials, prices, images and descriptions. This information is the fuel of digital commerce. But before it reaches your customers, it has to travel a long way – through what is known as the information supply chain. Unser Senior Consultant Matthias Jacob nimmt Sie mit auf die spannende Reise.
The challenge: data on the move
There are several familiar stages in this chain: the ERP system, which monitors stock levels; the PIM system, which maintains product information; and often a DAM system, which manages images and media. These systems are true data collectors, but they are not good storytellers. They know a lot, but they often only speak their own language.
And this is precisely where the problem begins:
customers, retailers or platforms want the data in their own format – structured, standardised, perhaps even in a specific standard such as BMECat or GAEB. Manufacturers in particular often have to comply with the wishes – or rather the demands – of their trading partners and their buyers, otherwise they face trouble or even penalties. And since most manufacturers have more than one customer, the variety of formats used by some product information producers can run into the hundreds.
Attempting to meet all these requirements directly from the source systems quickly resembles a complex puzzle: numerous interfaces, countless exports, individual adjustments – and every change costs time and money.
The solution: a translator between worlds
This is where a new player enters the information supply chain stage: P2C – "Product to Customer".
P2C can be thought of as an intelligent interpreter that mediates between a company's internal systems and a wide variety of customer systems.
A P2C system taps into the source systems, collects their data, brings it into a uniform, understandable form – and then converts it into the format the customer needs. Whether standardised or customised, whether XML, Excel or JSON – the system knows how to package the information appropriately.
The result? A single connection to the internal systems is sufficient to serve many different customer requirements. Data that previously had to be laboriously exported or programmed by hand now flows automatically and in a standardised format.
P2C's place in the system landscape
In a company's architecture, P2C acts as an intermediary between the source systems (such as ERP, PIM or DAM) and the customer's systems. Whenever customers demand industry standards or have very specific data requirements, P2C plays to its strengths.
It ensures that
- data from different sources is standardised ,
- transformations are standardised and reusable, and
- output formats can be designed flexibly .
The advantages – and what to consider
Once set up, a P2C system can take on many tasks that would otherwise have to be configured in PIM or ERP, which can be time-consuming:
- Many standard formats are already integrated.
- Training instead of programming:trained employees can maintain the system themselves.
- And it can serve as a bridge solution until the data quality in the source systems is fully harmonised.
But even P2C is not a miracle cure:
- it is additional softwarethat needs to be maintained.
- At the beginning, external expertise is often needed for setup.
- And – as always with data – the rule is: "Garbage in, garbage out." Poor input data remains poor output data.
What P2C is not
P2C is not a data storage facility. It is not a place where information is permanently stored. Instead, it functions like a control centre that processes data when needed.
This means: if ERP or PIM are offline, P2C does not deliver any data. It therefore depends on the stability of the source systems.
Conclusion: The new shortcut to the customer
P2C is more than just another combination of letters in the data jungle. It is a practical guide that helps companies deliver product data to their customers faster, more efficiently and in better quality.
Anyone who is still struggling with individual interfaces or manually building complex exports will find P2C to be a flexible companion on the path to a modern, scalable data strategy.
Find out whether this path is also worthwhile for your company in the second part.